


It's Different Now, I Think

by th_esaurus



Category: The Goldfinch (2019), The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt
Genre: Kissing, M/M, POV Second Person, Past Domestic Violence, Recreational Drug Use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-20
Updated: 2019-10-20
Packaged: 2020-12-27 00:34:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21109769
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/th_esaurus/pseuds/th_esaurus
Summary: “You were always miserable indoor-drunk,” Boris announced, pursing his lips.You barked out a sour laugh.“Let’s be outdoor-drunk.”





	It's Different Now, I Think

His coat smelled of tobacco and two sprays too many of Acqua di Parma. Your mouth was open and wet on the shoulder of his coat and every time you breathed in, heavy with laughter, you could taste that old, acrid tang of cheap cigarettes, suffused into the wool like he’d spent the night in a smokehouse years back and become cured; the cologne was a lingering aftertaste, sweet and clashing, a veneer of respectability. 

He was not a respectable man. You had the promise of being one, once upon a time, and had pissed it into the wind along with Hobie’s professional integrity and Pippa’s pitying affection. 

You leaned harder into his shoulder, your whole mouth against it, and he chuckled, rubbed his hand briskly up and down your back; not for the cold but for the comfort. You were drunk. You were drunk, he was drunk, the couple three tables down along the Westlight’s faux-bohemian rooftop were drunk. 

A weight the size of a small bird had been lifted from your chest, and Boris had said, “Let me come with you to New York. Potter, I’m insisting it. Don’t want to hear of you dead in Meatpacking brothel in two weeks.”

“Boris, don’t be abs— I’m past that now, Christ—”

“I know great weed guy in Brooklyn. Classy stuff, potent; potent! Get you off this hard shit, yes?” 

So Boris had returned with you to New York. Had followed you all the way to your sixth floor apartment, no question of a hotel, and had immediately begun picking up your books, reading the spines aloud, half judgemental, poking at tchotchkes and opening closets. Kitsey had done a marvellous job of clearing out. Her life had always been so segmented from yours. It must have been easy to box everything up while you were in Amsterdam and simply vanish. 

You bought beer and crudites from Foodtown and got drunk with Boris like the old days, boxers and t-shirts on the rug, unbuttered bread straight from the bag, sharing a joint and an ashtray and blowing billows of repugnant smoke out of the cracked-open window, as wide as the restrictor would let it go.

“You were always miserable indoor-drunk,” Boris announced, pursing his lips.

You barked out a sour laugh.

“Let’s be outdoor-drunk.”

“It’s—” You steadied your wrist to find your watch on it. Focused hard. “It’s 11 and we’re not dressed. Everywhere’ll be closing.”

“Coat,” he said, clapping his hands and jumping up, tugging at you like a child. “Scarf, socks, boots. Nobody any the wiser.”

Kitsey had liked Westlight. She would always have the bartender mix her up something off-menu: liked to give tasting notes as though they were a challenge. Red wine hit you the hardest, especially if you hadn’t eaten, so it was a safe go-to.

It hardly mattered now. You let Boris order for you both and a smiling waitress brought two cut glasses of Sazerac, encouraged you to squeeze the lemon zest over them like you’d never had a strong drink before, and left you to it. Boris at once brought out another joint from his coat pocket. 

“Don’t get me kicked out of this bar,” you complained.

“Your ex’s favourite bar? Good memories, yes?” You must’ve raised your eyebrows at him in surprise, because he laughed in your face. “You talk drunk, Potter. Lose tongue. Rambling to me all the way here.”

You could toast to that, you supposed. Spilling your goddamn beans. 

The cognac must’ve hit the beer in your stomach and instantly curdled; there were four empty glasses in front of you and the joint smoked to a nubbin and crushed out on the terrace brickwork; your mouth open against Boris’ scent-stained coat, a burble of laughter in your throat. 

“There he is,” Boris was saying lightly, a motherly sort of coo. “There he is, one too many, and all right with the world.”

“Do you remember when you used to kiss me?” you said suddenly.

Boris was silent for a moment. “Yes,” he replied slowly, as if sensing a trap. You were too delirious to ensnare him and would not have wanted to besides. It was just the first thing that came to mind: this alchemy of dark air, booze, a mellow high, Boris’s body against you, ancient cigarette smoke. There were sand filled ashtrays reflecting the sparse hanging lights dotted about the bench, and you thought of Las Vegas, old dust, Boris. 

“I thought perhaps you would not like to remember,” Boris was saying.

“I remember you’d—” you started, but could only say the rest of it to yourself, not out loud, not even in this state: you remembered the two of you used to share a bathtub in Boris’ father’s house, because Boris said he checked the bills like a hawk and would know, even after half a week’s absence, if the water was a buck or two higher than usual. Safer to share. You’d run the water too hot so that it took longer to get lukewarm, and both of you wore your swimming trunks, an unspoken pact. His knees were very pale and bony like an old man’s, and his legs much longer and thinner than yours, squeezing between your hips and the sides of the bathtub. He would show off his latest collection of bruises - it was rare and unusual that his father hit him on the face or arms, too visible, inviting too many questions, so under his oversized shirt was always a menagerie of shape and colour, yellow bruises from a week back, reddened skin where his father had slapped instead of hit; even once - Boris seemed almost proud to show it to someone - an angry welt where the tip of a cigarette butt had kissed him just under his bottommost left rib.

You could not smoke in Boris’ house, but you often brought beer from your father’s fridge and slugged it in the bathtub, holding the bottleneck between your loose fingers and feeling like John Wayne, dangerous and louche. Boris spat bathwater at your chest and neck. You rubbed the cracked bar of soap against his lips. He wasted shampoo on your hair to smother you in lather. Your laughter always sounded weird and hollow in the tiled, windowless bathroom, but you laughed even more to make up for it.

And then there were times when Boris, restless, would suddenly surge up against you, water sucked down to his end of the tub as he knelt, then crashing back into your stomach along with his body, his hands at your jaw, his mouth on your mouth before you could question or balk; pecking, frantic kisses, as though he were daring himself to see how many he could cram in before you pushed him away, but you didn’t, you weren’t sure you wanted this, but it always happened and you always let it. “Open your mouth,” he would say, a breathy whisper, pressing his thumb against your bottom lip and applying pressure. A different sort of kiss, then: your lips perpendicular, his tongue in your mouth, you struggling to catch up, your hands hovering above his bony hips, his pelvis, his iliac crest where the skin was stretched thinnest; your tongue in his mouth too. 

And always afterwards he would slump back, just as you were on the cusp of something, enjoyment or pleasure or acceptance, or, well, something more base; he’d just tip his body back to the other end of the tub, wipe the shine of spit off his lips with the heel of his palm, down whatever was left of his beer and carry on talking about whatever he had been talking about before he kissed you.

You stopped, breathless. “Was I—” you swallowed. “Thinking, or talking?”

Boris let his head tilt from side to side as though playing at making a decision, whether to save face for you or put you out of your misery. “Talking,” he admitted. “But I think you wanted to say it.”

“I just remembered it so clearly. I haven’t thought about that shit in years.”

His hand was on your back again, drawing slow circles. 

“Why do you bring this up, Potter?” he asked gently. You twisted your head and buried all of your face into his shoulder instead of answering. “You bring it up so I will kiss you again, hmm?”

“—Shut up.”

“We both know Freud is a hack, psychotherapy all bullshit, but this reverse psychology you pull is kids’ stuff. Childish, Potter.”

“Boris, shut up.”

“You are miserable, my wife has not touched me in two years, blue-balls everywhere, so I think you would like me to kiss you.”

It’s not worth arguing with him like this, you figured that out long ago. Ignore him and he’ll drop it. 

“Here? Or we go back to the apartment? That nice waitress is waiting to close up shop, I think.”

Ignore him.

“But you will become chicken, if I wait? You forget I know you, Potter. Beer - all weepy and hysterical. Spirits, they give you a little fire. Weed, ah, I always liked when we smoked together, handsy, yes, and you all affectionate like a pup—”

“Fuck—fuck  _ off _ , Boris.”

He laughed at you, tussling your shoulder. You’d left a wet patch of spittle just outside the collar of his coat. Blinking, you rubbed at it with your wrist as if to clean it. 

“No bother,” Boris said lightly, noticing.

And he caught your hand in his. Brought it to his lap. Held it, both his palms encasing yours, quite desperate for a second. As if you were the only source of heat in the world, and he had come in from the cold.

“I felt bad,” he said. “Very guilty. You did not want it.”

“I—I didn’t  _ not _ want it.”

“Me also,” he sighed, looking out at the sky; Prussian blue. “I did not not want it.”

You couldn’t think of anything to say to that. 

“And now?” Boris asked. 

“What?”

“When I kiss you now? Will you want it, or not want it, or not not want it?”

“You’re not going to kiss me.”

“You are the one bringing it up.” He sounded quite serious. 

Jesus Christ, you were drunk. You wanted to bury your face in his neck and make him carry you home, on the condition he did not talk the entire way there. He’d reek of cologne, up that close, but he’d also smell like Boris: like Las Vegas, like Amsterdam, like Poland and Russia and Romania and Canada. Like the drugs he trafficked; like the masterpiece he stole. White spirit and fresh paint; volatile organic compounds. Cigarettes you’d smoked as children. Used bathwater.

*

“And now?” Boris asked you again, looking you straight in the eye.   
  



End file.
